The Stibbert Museum: a collector's villa and its English park
An Anglo-Italian eccentric's house of armour, a cavalcade of mounted knights, and a romantic park on the hill of Montughi. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Via Stibbert, the climb
From the tram, the walk up the hill of *Montughi* leaves the traffic behind fast — a quiet residential lane, garden walls, the city dropping away. Twenty minutes of gentle climbing; treat it as the warm-up, not a chore.

2. Museo Stibbert — the Cavalcade Hall
The reason to come: *Frederick Stibbert*, half-English, half-Italian, spent a fortune filling his villa with armour and then staged it. In the great hall, a column of life-size knights and horses in full Renaissance armour rides at you down the room. Theatrical, slightly mad, and the one image you'll carry home — the Japanese and Ottoman armouries are nearly as good.

3. The villa's interiors
Beyond the armour, the house is left much as Stibbert kept it — sixty crowded rooms of tapestries, costume, paintings, and bric-a-brac hung floor to ceiling in high Victorian taste. You don't tour it freely; entry is by guided visit, so check the timed slots before you climb.

4. The English-style park
Stibbert landscaped the grounds himself in the romantic English manner — winding paths, a pond, specimen trees, follies set to be stumbled upon. Free to wander when the museum's open. The contrast with the formal Tuscan garden is the whole charm; let yourself get briefly lost.

5. The Egyptian temple folly
Down by the pond, a small mock-Egyptian temple with sphinxes — exactly the kind of folly a wealthy Victorian put in his garden to surprise his guests. Sit on the steps a while; this corner of the park is almost always empty.

6. Back down through Montughi
Walk the hill back down by a different lane if you can — the villas of *Montughi* are worth the detour, old money behind high gates. The descent reassembles the city in front of you, and the T2 tram waits at the bottom for the ride back in.

The Stibbert Museum: a collector's villa and its English park